Security Onion Intrusion Detection System Basic Setup Tutorial

Security Onion is one of my favorite tools. Doug Burks did an amazing job pulling many of the top open source Network Security Monitoring (NSM) and Intrusion Detection System (IDS) programs. You can run Security Onion in Live CD mode, or you can install it and run it off of your hard drive.

It’s based on Xubuntu 10.04 and contains a ton of programs including Snort, Suricata, Sguil, Squert, argus, Xplico, tcpreplay, scapy, hping, and many other security tools. Sounds complicated right? Well, Doug has done the hard work in pulling all these tools together into an easy to use Linux distribution.

Run this on a system that has two network cards and you have a complete NSM/IDS system. One NIC connects to your network or the internet side of your traffic and records and monitors every packet that comes in or goes out of your system. The second NIC connects to your LAN side and can be used to remotely view and monitor intrusion attempts and security threats.

The exceptional basic setup video above was created by Adrian Crenshaw aka “Irongeek”. Adrian has always done an amazing job passing on information on the latest security tools and techniques. Irongeek.com has a ton of videos and security how too’s, check it out!